Thursday, May 9, 2013

"What Do We Know?"

I think about this all the time.But most recently, a reminder of this – for
me, more important than anything else issue – came flying at me from multiple
directions.

I have not seen the movie 42, the 2013 incarnation of the Jackie Robinson story.The reason I haven’t is that, with rare
exceptions – The Jolson Story (1946),
Bound For Glory (1977) and Ray (2004) – three rarities in
fifty-eight years of moviemaking – when I go see “biopics”, I almost never
emerge satisfied.My lingering question
being:

“Is that really them?”

Of course, it’s not really them, as in them themselves
– it’s an actor portraying them.What the question means is, “Is that actor – and the writer who wrote the screenplay
– portraying that person in any way that is reliably accurate?

A notable exception to the “them” on the screen not being
the actual “them” is The Jackie Robinson
Story (1950), in which the real Jackie Robinson played himself.

Or did he?

“It wasn’t me.”

“It sure looked
like you, Jackie.”

“It was me physically.But what I said in the movie bore little
resemblance to what I actually said.And
the things that happened to me was severely cleaned up to conform to the strict
content requirements of the American Motion Picture Code.”

“So very little of it is actually real?”

“The ‘fundamentals’ are real – I broke the Major Leagues
color barrier.I played for the Dodgers.And there was one other thing that was real.”

“What’s that?”

“The money I was paid for doing the movie.”

Think about that.You
went to The Jackie Robinson Story,
you saw a person playing himself, and
even then, there was little certainty of biographical accuracy.

The real Jackie Robinson was playing a made-up Jackie
Robinson.Can we honestly expect a more truthful portrayal from somebody
else?(In fact, The New Yorker movie reviewer David Denby opined that 42’s Chadwick Boseman provided a more
persuasive portrayal of Jackie Robinson than Jackie did.Yikes!That’s like entering a “Look-Alike Contest” for yourself, and coming in second.)

The other recent occasion where I was confronted with the
question of “What do we know?” was at the Louvre,
during our recent visit to Paris.

You see these famous artists’ portraits of the notables of
their era hanging on the walls, and the first thing you, or at least I – wonder
is, “Is that really them?”

Going solely by those portraits, if we were to go back in
time, would we recognize those notables if we passed them on the street?What if, in real life, they had a
Witherspoonian chin, or a disfiguring carbuncle on their nose?How do you square the artist’s obligation to paint
what they see with their responsibility to the subjects who are paying them? It’s a real dilemma:

“Do I paint them more favorably and become a traitor to the
truth?Or do I paint them as they are
and risk not getting paid, and possibly – if it’s a big shot, or a pope or
something – worse?”

If their decision was the former – and the smart money says
that it was – then what exactly are we looking at? Counterfeit portraits, hanging in the Louvre.

“The Countess’s face is really my girlfriend’s.But the dress and the jewelry are on the
money!”

Finally, there’s When General
Grant Expelled the Jews (by Jonathan D. Sarna, 2012.)In a nutshell, at the height of the Civil War,
opportunistic Northern businessmen were discovered smuggling gold into the South
to pay for contraband cotton, the gold then going to subsidize the Confederate
war effort.Since a substantial number
of those businessmen – including two partners of his own father – were Jewish,
an irate Grant issued General Orders No. 11,
banishing Jews “as a class” from his war zone.(When he heard about it, President Lincoln countermanded this order, and
it was never put into effect.)

When General Grant
Expelled the Jews strongly argues that the vociferous outcry against him by
prominent Jewish Americans – Grant was compared with the iconic Jew-hater Haman
– led Grant, either out of guilt or political expediency, to bend over backwards
to disprove his antipathy towards the Jews throughout the rest of his life,
including his two terms as president, during which Grant appointed more Jews to
important positions than any president before him.The book’s message seems to be, “You don’t
mess with the Jews.”

The problem for me, from an accuracy standpoint, is that When General Grant Expelled the Jews was
published in collaboration which Nextbook,
which, it is announced on the book’s first page, is “a project devoted to the
promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas.”(The book’s second page offers a list of Nextbook’s other publications, including
books about King David, Maimonides, and Spinoza, with forthcoming books about
Abraham and Moses.This is indisputably
a Jew-centric operation.Which triggers
questions of bias in When General Grant
Expelled The Jews storytelling.Including the book’s title, because, though Grant issued the order, the
Jews were never actually expelled.)

General Orders No. 11 is
an historical fact.The event is included
in the book-on-tape I am currently listening to, The Man Who Saved The Union – Ulysses Grant In War And Peace, by H.
W, Brands.The question is, “How significant
was this anti-Semitic blunder in Grant’s future career?”When
General Grant Expelled the Jews claims it was enormous.But the book’s dedication is in Hebrew.

By the way, wrapping things up, The Man Who Saved The Union arguably underplays the issue of Grant’s drunkenness.This seems like a subject at least as
significant as Grant’s unsuccessful efforts as a farmer, though Brands devotes
considerably more attention to that.Again, I worry about the balance.And, if Brands is unbalanced about the
drunkenness issue, what else is he unbalanced about?

Historical accounts – cinematic, artistic and literary –
abound.But if all they provide are manipulations,
distortions and inaccuracies, what we know for certain…

3 comments:

They've shown that the first time you remember something, you're remembering it (though not completely). The second time you remember something you're not remembering the event, you're actually remembering the last time you remembered it.

It's like a solitary game of telephone.

This is actually beneficial, though, for traumas. They've used it to help with PTSD. If they sedate the patient (with anti-anxiety drugs and such) and then have them remember the trauma, they will remember it with less anxiety. Then, when they remember the trauma again (without drugs) they will remember the sedated remembrance of it. And so on.

So when it comes to reality - nobody can really know it, only experience it.

One of my favourite biopics is "Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind," the Chuck Barris story (directed by George Clooney), based on his autobiography - because he knew his life story wasn't going to make a great read, so he gave himself an outrageous past life and wrote is as the truth. The film treats it all as the truth, and it's a fun film.